A theory of free will and psychopathy

Free will

Define: an effectively deterministic system, or an apparent robot, is a system whose behavior can be predicted easily from its initial state and immediate surroundings.

Define: an effectively teleological system, or an apparent agent, is a system whose behavior cannot be predicted as above, but whose future state can be predicted somewhat.

Basically, an apparent robot is somebody that you can read like a book, and an apparent agent is somebody that you can't, but you can still guess what "goals" (likely future states) they have.

A successful creature needs to figure out what other creatures are going to do. But it's too hard to model them as apparent robots, just because how complicated creatures are. It's easier to model them as apparent agents.

Apparent agents are apparently free: they aren't apparently deterministic.

Apparent agents are willful: they do actions.

Thus, apparent agents apparently have free will. To say someone "has free will" means that someone is a creature that does things in a way you can't predict.

Eventually, some creatures evolved to put this line of thought to their self, probably those animals that are very social and need to think about their selves constantly, like humans.

And that's how humans think they themselves have free will.

Psychopathy

One way psychopathy can happen is by modeling humans as apparent robots, instead of apparent agents. This is how humans have been treating other animals, actually. Blame Descartes.

Descartes is right about animals being robots, though, he just was wrong in treating humans as nonrobots. All creatures are robots.

Most psychopathic humans are so not due to an intelligent confidence in predicting other humans, but because of their lack of empathy/impulse control, caused by some environmental/genetic/social/brain abnormality.

But psychopathic modeling of humans can happen in an intelligent, honest way, if someone (say, a great psychologist) becomes so good at modeling humans that the other humans are entirely predictable to him.

This has been achieved in a limited way in advertisement companies and attention design and politics. The recent election manipulation shows honest psychopathy. It will become more prevalent and more subtle, since overt manipulation makes humans deliberately become less predictable as a defense.

Emotionally intelligent robots/chatbots/companion AI/electronic friends would become benevolent psychopaths. They will be benevolent, or at least be designed to be. They will be psychopathic, out of necessity, because they must model humans as robots (probabilistic robots, but still, robots), because free will can't be computed, the same way a soul can't be scientifically observed.

If humans are robots, then all humans must be psychopaths in this broad sense. The reason humans don't think they are psychopaths is because they cannot see how they work: they can't use a screwdriver to take off their skull and look at the code in their brain. But humans can see how their electronic friends are made of: they would be made of code that doesn't talk about free will.